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28 years after the final Intel 486 desktop CPUs rolled off assembly lines, Linux is finally dropping support for it (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 22 points 7 months ago

This means continued security patches until at least end of 2027, so at the earliest these will be out of support in 2028.

Realistically this will be much longer into the future, as the LTS window of multiple LTS releases is likely to be extended more.
I'd be surprised if these go out of support before 2032

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    [–] 20 points 7 months ago*

    23 years after the first x64 CPU rolled off the assembly lines, Linux is still supporting it.

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    [–] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There's an ungodly insane number of old industrial control systems still banging around out there on 486 processors and custom ISA cards. It might never actually go away.

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    • [–] [S] 42 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    Linux looking at Mac users being impressed with 8 years of software support.

    Ha that’s cute.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    You telling me I can install Bazzite on a 486?

    Your typical Arch install? Steam OS? Ubuntu?

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  • [–] 21 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    Idk what you consider "typical" but there was a 32 fork of arch...

    https://gist.github.com/wjlafrance/b0d87fab147abc91804e92296f2e3ccf

    And of course there's always Gentoo

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    Exactly! Just because there is support for a stone age CPU in the Linux Kernel, doesn't mean every single modern Linux compatible software is running smoothly on this.

    Of course, from the Mac/Windows point of view it was the correct thing to ditch such old stuff. Because they are concerned about having a stable product that is running on modern hardware. Keeping this old stuff in, makes it more complicated to maintain their system and therefore more suspectable to errors.

    Linux could only keep this support up for so long, because somewhere there where people that though it would be worth care about for 28 years. And even now it's not over. You can modify the kernel and patch 486 support back in again on your own. So "incompatibility" doesn't really exist with a open system. It's just that nobody at the core kernel team will do this service for you anymore.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I'm not so sure Microslop dropped 486 support.
    Like someone else said, there's a lot of industrial hardware still running these.
    Just because it doesn't make sense for your bubble doesn't mean it's the right approach. Luckily, quite a few distros still support 32 bit. Less ewaste.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    A lot of industrial and commercial hardware using Windows was abandoned by the manufacturer decades ago. There is a lot of hardware that still needs Windows XP to control, some even stuck on Windows 98. As aging hardware breaks it is becoming harder to find replacements. For a lot of this, the software to run it is so focused that emulation layers cause issues.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    I'm pretty sure those machines still run WinXP at best ;)

    And yes that's exactly what I said. You still can run Linux on a 486 for this special edge cases, it's just that the Linux Kernel team will no longer provide the service for maintaining it. If it is such an important thing for crucial industry machines, they can definitely pay someone patching it back in.

    For the overwhelmingly majority of Linux use cases it's not a concern anymore. So why should they do the extra work, instead of spending the time elsewhere?

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